... in the human drama of hatred, suffering and death.”
That was a brief remark made today about St. Maximilian Kolbe by Pope Benedict XVI in his Angelus address. I knew that today was Kolbe's feast day, but hadn't realized (being rather bad with numbers and dates) that it was also the 70th anniversary of his heroic martyrdom. The Jewish Virtual Library site provides this overview of Kolbe's death:
During the Second World War he provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution in his friary in Niepokalanów. He was also active as a radio amateur, with Polish call letters SP3RN, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.
On February 17, 1941 he was arrested by the German Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, and on May 25 was transferred to Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670.
In July 1941 a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts. (The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.) One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.
During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. Finally he was murdered with an injection of carbolic acid.
Father Kolbe was beatified as a confessor by Pope Paul VI in 1971 and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982 in the presence of Franciszek Gajowniczek. Upon canonization, the Pope declared St. Maximilian Kolbe not a confessor, but a martyr.
Last year I posted the following passage about St. Maximilian from the Epilogue of Suffering of Love: Christ’s Descent into the Hell of Human Hopelessness (Ignatius Press, 2006), by Regis Martin, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville; I think it is worth posting again:
In one word, Kolbe substitutes himself for another. At the eleventh hour, he takes the place of a grieving husband and father whom the SS have randomly chosen, along with nine or so others, to die in a bunker deprived of food and water. Protracted starvation: a horrible way to die."What does this Polish pig want?" demanded the SS officer, wearing the dreaded death's head insignia of the Gestapo, when the slight figure of Father Kolbe came forward dressed in his prison garb—the very insignia of man's humiliation, beneath which, in Kolbe's case, shines the unseen holiness of Almighty God. "I am a Catholic priest", he replied. "I want to die for that man. I am old; he has a wife and children." Incredulous, the officer nevertheless permits the substitution, providing thereby the sacramental working out of what Charles Williams, citing Saint Paul, was so wont to call the Great Web of Exchange. Kolbe and the others are then led away to die. A fortnight's agony later, all but four have died and of these only Kolbe remains conscious. Gestapo patience at last having worn thin, an injection of phenol is administered and now Kolbe too is dead. It is August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Mother, the Woman clothed with the sun and the moon and the stars, who long before had promised young Maximilian the twin crowns of purity and martyrdom for God. This same Woman, who had herself been schooled in suffering and sorrow, indeed whose mute and anguished consent to her Son's immolation on Calvary became the deepest kenosis of faith in all history, to recall the moving text of Pope John Paul II's encyclical.
Nearly forty years later Poland's Pope would visit that bunker and before a vast crowd declare how "victory through faith and love was won by Maximilian Kolbe in this place, which was built for the negation of faith, and to trample radically not only on love but on all signs of human dignity, of humanity: a place built on hatred and contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology." And quoting 1 John 5:4, he concluded: "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world, and this is the victory that with faith overcometh the world." So the Pope reminded the world when, in 1979, he went to Auschwitz to speak of Father Kolbe's victory, of its profound source in the love and the faith of God, and of its continuing relevance to the world.
But it must be understood in all its fullness as a victory for all, for both Jew and Christian alike; otherwise the whole expiatory point of Kolbe's substitution is lost. The victory of the one cannot be denied the other, for the act of exchange is for the other. United thus in the same school of suffering, wedded as one by the one Christ, Jew and Christian stand together as joint beneficiaries of the priestly heroism of Kolbe precisely because, behind it, there stands the universal, infinitely efficacious priestly sacrifice of the Son of God, broken on his Cross to become the bread for the world. Spiritually, then, as Pius XI would tirelessly point out to a world about to witness wholesale liquidations of God’s people, spiritually we are all Semites.
Related on Ignatius Insight:
• The Cross and The Holocaust | Regis Martin | From the Prologue to Suffering of Love: Christ's Descent into the Hell of Human Hopelessness
• Chapter 1 of Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau | Fr. Jean Bernard
• St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross | Ignatius Insight
• Forget Not Love: The Passion of Maximilian Kolbe: The Passion of Maximilian Kolbe, by Andre Frossard
• Maximilian: Saint of Auschwitz (DVD), by Leonardo Defilippis
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